In most working cultures it’s a given that support is conducive to a productive atmosphere. As an employee you might even expect it. But imagine if your boss instituted a new system whereby the general public, who’d been briefed on what you did for five minutes, were invited to file into your office each day [...]
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Was cinema kind to us in 2011? No. Cinema is an arts medium, it isn’t a person; it’s incapable of kindness. It was a stupid question for you to ask. Let’s put that to one side and consider what was presented to audiences this year. The best, as we shall see, used nostalgia and nous [...]
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Never Let Me Go was first published in 2005 and was written by Kazuo Ishiguro, who grew up in Japan and moved to Britain at the age of five. Other novels of his include The Remains of the Day (1989) which won the Booker Prize, and The Unconsoled (1995) which was the winner of the [...]
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Trailer Trash For almost as long as there have been movies, there have been movie trailers. In 1913 Nils Granlund, the advertising manager for the Marcus Loew theatre chain, came up with a unique and innovative way of promoting a play called The Pleasure Seekers. He produced a short promotional film for the play [...]
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“Box… three…. spool… five” (Krapp’s Last Tape, Ian Rickson, UK, 2007, 45mins) The rasping, almost grating voice of the great Harold Pinter severs the silent opening after four minutes of the audience watching the disconcerting struggle of the character on their screens. No music plays as a backdrop to the close-ups of Pinter’s wearisome face. [...]
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Bliss and the Abyss 2010 has been the year of the underdog: unlikely heroes and darkly ambiguous endings have dominated Hollywood narrative cinema, with a few rule-proving exceptions (predominantly from the animated stable). Several outstanding movies achieved unexpected success, perhaps due to an otherwise mediocre slate of releases. This story you know. Meanwhile, beyond the [...]
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‘Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap’ It takes a brave man to enter a warzone; it takes a braver man to enter a warzone clutching a camera instead of a gun. For most of his long career, photographer Tim Hetherington has been documenting life in some of the world’s most destructive and bloody conflicts. Spending eight years [...]
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A look at the history of Disney.
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All Roads Lead to Rome In the same way that the real world, from Charlemagne’s Carolingian Empire to the Soviet Union’s Cold War hegemony over half of Europe, has continually sought to recreate some semblance of the Roman Empire, the filmic world has long held a fascination with the opulence, power, and brutality of Ancient [...]
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